When Joe Spector’s corgi, Eddie, ate four M&Ms, the Hims co-founder spent hours trying to find an emergency vet to treat him. At one office, I was directed to a pet poison hotline, and at another office, I was forced to wait for four hours an hour away. The bill came to $2,000.
Spector thought at the time that “it didn’t have to be that way,” he said. luck.
This stressful scramble in 2021 sparked the idea for Dutch, which veterinary telemedicine company Specter launched on July 1 of the same year, after helping build and take public Hims & Hers, a direct-to-consumer telemedicine brand best known for hair loss and sexual health treatments. These companies have since grown exponentially to cover a variety of health concerns.
Dutch, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary, offers members video visits with a veterinarian covering up to five pets for a flat fee of $100 per year. This is approximately the cost of one in-person visit to a regular veterinary clinic. As more states loosen regulations on veterinary telemedicine, the company now operates in 35 states, up from eight when it was founded. The company says it has logged millions of interactions and currently has over 100,000 active members. Dutch raised $20 million in a round led by Forerunner Ventures in early 2022 to expand its platform.
The company did not disclose its current revenue and valuation, but its revenue grew 5.5x between 2022 and 2023, 2.2x between 2023 and 2024, and 1.8x between 2024 and 2025.
Fire your agency to grow your business
Although the Netherlands currently has a clear growth trajectory, it has been a bit stagnant for some time. Spectre is now making bigger bets on how it markets itself.
Late last year, Spector said, Dutch was paying outside agencies about $50,000 a month, or about $10,000 each, to produce five pieces of creative material.
“A lot of marketing, especially for new products, is just testing to see what resonates, so it’s expensive and it’s limited,” Spector said.
So he fired the agency. This drastic move somehow reminds me of something Bolt’s CEO said. luck At the Workplace Innovation Summit in May, he fired his entire human resources team, but executives had very different motivations for the move.
In its place is a new in-house marketing team focused on AI tools to generate content, from static ads to fully animated and live-action commercials. Currently, Holland produces about 50 pieces of content a month in-house, a tenfold increase, Spector said. This amount of work costs the agency approximately $500,000 per month. Just as important as the savings, he said, is the ability to test what virtual veterinary care actually does for pet owners, who often don’t know it exists.
“We have to overcome the element of trust,” he said. “We need to educate consumers about how this works or what the use cases are.”
Dutch’s presence in the meta increased from about 5% to about a quarter of ad spend. According to the company, in the first full month since the new team was launched, the company has reduced customer acquisition costs by 20% (compared to January and April 2026, before the team was launched), and the number of viewers increased by 20% from February to March compared to the previous month. Spector said the Netherlands is also using AI in measurement aspects such as A/B testing, brand lift research and search strategy.
Indeed, Spector is quick to credit people, not just software.
“You shouldn’t take the credit for me. It’s for the marketers,” he said. He added that the team has made it possible to leverage the tools.
The goal for Spector is to move Holland upstream. The company built its early growth on bottom-of-funnel Google searches, reaching pet owners in the midst of an emergency, he said. Now he wants to increase brand awareness and get owners thinking of the Netherlands before a crisis hits.
That’s partly why the Netherlands brought on former Olympic figure skater Tara Lipinski as a brand ambassador. Spector said Lipinski came to Dutch as a client after he lost his home in the Los Angeles fires and needed care for his dog.
“One of the feelings I want people to have is this sense of relief,” Spector said.
